Edwin is an experienced writer, editor & content manager. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.

While we’re still only at the start of the Gutenberg adventure, we’re presenting an awesome, brand-new feature for the new WordPress editor today. Meet the Yoast SEO structured data content blocks! The content blocks automatically add valid structured data code to the content that is added to these blocks. Our initial line-up consists of How-to and FAQ content blocks, plus address and map blocks for our Local SEO plugins, but we’re looking to add more in the future.

Adding structured data in Gutenberg

Structured data is important but pretty hard to implement. By adding Schema.org structured data to your pages you can tell search engines exactly what’s on there. For most people implementing it comes down to asking their developer to hard-code it into the site. Or learning to master Google Tag Manager so you can inject the necessary code into your pages — this is what we teach you in our Structured data training. This complexity is one of the reasons structured data has been struggling to reach critical mass, even though Google has been pushing it for years. This is now changing with Gutenberg structured data content blocks in Yoast SEO 8.2!

As of today, we’re adding that structured data metadata automatically to the content that’s added to two new Gutenberg blocks inside Yoast SEO, namely How-to and FAQ. Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO have blocks for addresses and maps. So, if you have an FAQ page on your site you can now build these pages inside Gutenberg. Yoast SEO will automatically add the necessary Question Schema.org to that block. The same goes for How-to. Build your how-to article with the How-to content block in Gutenberg, including all the necessary steps and even images, and see a valid piece of structured data appear in the source of your page. It is now easier than ever for Google to find and understand that particular piece of content. Fantastic, right?

How-to structured data

How-to structured data is a fairly new addition to the Schema.org vocabulary. You use it to mark up content that teaches you how to do something following a series of steps. This could be how to cat-proof your apartment or how to install Yoast SEO Premium or something else entirely. We published a post a while back on how to add how-to structured data to your how-to articles. Please read that if you need more background information.

The structured data content blocks come with default styling, but we made it easy for you to change these. Our UX designer Luc wrote a post detailing how you can give the How-to content blocks your own styling so they fit right in with the rest of your site. There will be a post about styling your FAQ content blocks later on.

Use the Insert step button to insert a new step between existing steps

Done? Save your draft!

Here’s an example how-to on how to install Yoast SEO Premium:And here’s what Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool says of that page:Epic, right? Remember, due to restrictions by Google it is not possible to add more than one How-to content block on a page.

FAQ structured data

If you have a section on your site for frequently asked questions — an FAQ— then you’ll enjoy the new FAQ structured data content block. Schema.org/Question is “A specific question – e.g. from a user seeking answers online, or collected in a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document.” You can now easily add the structured data needed for search engines to understand FAQ content. Just fill in the questions, add the answers and maybe an image if needed. Hit publish and your perfectly structured FAQ block is ready!

Local SEO & WooCommerce SEO with Gutenberg blocks

Of course, we had to give some of our other SEO WordPress plugins some Gutenberg love as well. Do you own a local business or are you doing a lot of local SEO? If so, you need our Local SEO or WooCommerce SEO plugins. These plugins help you to improve your site so it can more easily rank in your local search results.

Today, the two local SEO plugins get structured data content blocks for Gutenberg as well: you can now add valid structured data to your site by adding the new address block. The fields will appear automatically if you’ve filled in the fields in the plugin settings. Of course, you can finetune what you do and don’t want to appear. In addition, you can use the new Google Maps structured data content block to easily add a good looking map with structured data to your site.

More to come

Gutenberg’s block-based design makes it a very interesting platform to design for. These structured data content blocks are our first tools specifically built for the new WordPress editor. We hope to expand our offering of structured data blocks in the near future. We can’t wait to bring you blocks for job postings, events and recipes, among others! And please, do give us your feedback so we can make these blocks even more awesome.

Polish readability analysis

Yoast SEO 8.2 also brings a new supported language: Polish! We can now analyze text written in Polish and make suggestions to improve the readability. In addition, we will now also suggest articles to link to using our internal linking tool in Yoast SEO Premium. The Polish readability analysis was made possible by contributions from the community. We’re thankful for the great support from the people at Macopedia, who sent us word lists which make a vital part of our analysis. We’re always super enthusiastic when people in the community show us their love for our products and also a commitment to the open source spirit by contributing to our code base!

Bug fixes and enhancements

As always, we’ve fixed a couple of annoying bugs. This time we focused on fixing bugs related to slugs, user input incorrectly triggering analyses, zooming issues on iPhones and several others. You can read up on them in the changelog. We do want to thank mt8, who helped us fix a bug related to OpenGraph images that wouldn’t correctly show for the front page in a couple of situations.

Update now!

Yoast SEO 8.2 is a very exciting release. With the launch of the structured data content blocks for Gutenberg, we’re heading into unknown and very exciting territory. We can’t wait to see what you do with the current set of blocks and hope to bring even more blocks to you in the near future. Try it, tell us what you think and enjoy using Yoast SEO 8.2!

Wow, this structured data function will make my life much more easier! I am so happy for this function!

Marcus Tibesar • 4 months ago

Adding the FAQ block is straight forward. We just added the block and then copy and pasted our Questions and Answers all into the FAQ block.

Virginia • 4 months ago

Hi, I have a blog and I’m afraid that these content blocks may discourage people to visit my page. They just see the 1,2,3 steps at Google search results and stop there. I can’t monetize if people find answers to their questions at Google before clicking my link.

When will people get it that Google is a database and they need to use fields in their code?

Respects

Jason • 4 months ago

This is exciting. I’ve been using WordPress for almost 10 years and I’ve scrapped almost every SEO plugin once I’ve discovered Yoast. Structured Data was very difficult to grasp for me, even though I have a strong technical background. This makes my life much easier. Any plans to incorporate this with your Woocommerce plugin so I may sell more coins on my website (sorry for the subtle self promotion LOL)

Michał Dybczak • 4 months ago

Wow! Polish support, finally! Now Yoast Premium will be really useful! I’ve been wanting this for so long.

I have a question thou. You said you added Polish readability. What about keywords? Is Yoast recognizing various grammar forms of keywords or key phrases now? Or is it a part that still needs to be added?

This is really fabulous stuff. I always hoped the new editor would improve content semantics and this is such a beautiful example of that!

With that in mind, did you consider (or would you consider?) using summary and details elements for the markup (or as a second “Accordion FAQ” block) to allow a native and semantic accordion display of FAQs (a common request from many).

Clint • 4 months ago

Hello, I was wondering, does Gutenberg enhance the category editor so it functions more like the post editor? Currently the category editor doesn’t allow you to create very good Category pages. Thanks

Mark E. • 4 months ago

Great to see Yoast incorporating structured data handling! Can you please prioritise the EVENTS structured data block in the future? Thanks!

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Edwin Toonen • 4 months ago

Hi Mark. Don’t worry, events is high on our list as we use that ourselves ;)

Kim - The Blog Genie • 4 months ago

I’m loving the updates to Yoast that have come alongside Gutenberg. I have noticed since the latest update however, that Yoast no longer highlights sentences over 20 words. Is this a deliberate change, or something that will be fixed soon? It’s a very handy feature and I’d be sorry to see it removed permanently.

I am sure this new update will definitely a remarkable and valuable changes in SEO technique for a website. Ease of structure data implementation will make a lot of sense in google ranking.

Thanks a ton to gutenberg team for this awesome development.

Surya

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Edwin Toonen • 4 months ago

You’re welcome, Surya!

tim • 4 months ago

After installing this update I am having major problems with my webshop. Any other having same issues?

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Edwin Toonen • 4 months ago

Hi Tim. I’m sorry to hear that. Care to elaborate?

Mark • 4 months ago

What about an option for adding structured data to themes such as “DIVI” or other well established builders ?

Are you purely focusing on Gutenberg ?

Jason • 4 months ago

Ditto on waiting for Divi/Gutenberg compatibility, or for Yoast to create a divi module for that. Or for Elegant Themes to knock that out.

Iman • 4 months ago

I love to have that as well

Antun • 4 months ago

1. In the “how-to”, Is the name field in the structured data same as the title of the post?
2. What if we dont add total time? (is still valid). For some how-to articles, we don’t have a logical and precise time frame.
3. Do you recommend editing old how-to articles (which don’t have how to structured data?

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Edwin Toonen • 4 months ago

1. Yes, the title of the how-to comes from whatever is in the h1.
2. You can use it without adding a time. If you leave the time field bank it won’t be added to the structured data.
3. If you have the time and resources and if it’s viable for you to do so, why not?

Nice addition, These will make it easy to implement schemas on the site. Is there a way to change the design or let them fall back on site design. Some content syndication doesn’t prefer having the numbered list like Apple News, so we might need to do some modifications before using how to block in the posts.